Once Original Now Common / Anime & Manga

• Tokyopop is a meta-example.
  • They were the first U.S. manga publisher who published a lot of unflipped, read-it-right-to-left manga in English.^note This had been done before, but extremely seldom. We're talking a total of less than ten manga books, tops, and most of them were too obscure for either comics fans or manga lovers to have heard of them.
  • The affordable ten-dollar digest editions that pretty much all U.S. manga publishers use nowadays were their idea. Before Tokyopop started publishing those, the norm had been to publish translated manga flipped left-to-right, in single-issue comic books with a chapter or two in each issue, which were then collected in trade paperbacks, just like American comic books.
  • Nowadays, almost all U.S. manga editions leave the original sound effects in, but Tokyopop were the first ones to make it standard procedure. These days, people will simply be annoyed by how there's no translation of the SFX at all in the Tokyopop editions, so that you'll have to figure out what it's supposed to sound like on your own.
  • Another idea of theirs was the concept of having your manga sold in bookstores instead of in comic book stores. This really helped increase their potential customer-base. This is also because a lot of bookstores may be placed in area(s) of the town where kids without cars can access them — i.e. the mall. Not to mention, comic book stores don't even exist in some towns in Flyover Country — but bookstores themselves do.
  • Content-wise, they were the first ones in the USA to publish high school romance shoujo manga. Pretty much all of what little shoujo had been published in the USA up until that point had featured some element of adventure or fantasy that the publishers hoped would appeal to male readers, but Tokyopop published high-school romances like His and Her Circumstances and Marmalade Boy, that had no supernatural or adventure elements and were clearly intended for girls (but good enough to be read by anyone regardless of gender). In short, Tokyopop was the first American manga publisher to fully accept that manga didn't have to pretend to be American comic books. Nowadays every publisher does this, so Tokyopop's editions come off as cheap-looking compared to, say, Viz's and Kodansha's manga. Especially the early Tokyopop releases. The translations of Sailor Moon and Magic Knight Rayearth were absolutely painful with spelling and character name inconsistencies galore. The fact that it's un-flipped is just Asbestos-Free Cereal now that it goes without saying that you don't flip your manga.
• This also happens a lot with dubbing. Since the standards for anime dub voice acting have improved so much in recent years, many dubs that were considered huge steps forward in quality for their time have become increasingly unpopular among modern viewers. Examples include Ranma ½ and Neon Genesis Evangelion. An even better example would be the Tenchi Muyo! franchise. Back in the day (around 1994, to be exact), the use of union actors combined with clever dub scripts was considered a groundbreaking development in the world of anime dubbing. While many people still look back fondly on the dub even now, more level-headed viewers without a Nostalgia Filter will notice the dubs' miscast actors and actresses, awkward delivery, and overall poor acting quality in comparison to modern dubs for anime like Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and Fullmetal Alchemist. Part of the reason why the FMA and Cowboy Bebop dubs remain popular decades later is because they happen to avert a lot of the dub trends that would fail to hold up with time, though the Bebop dub does start out fairly rough for its first few episodes (oddly correlating with the amount of time it took for the show itself to grow the beard).
• Cutey Honey will make you cringe, until you realize it created the template for anime fanservice, for the Magical Girl Warrior archetype and possibly featured the first Action Girl main character. If you don't remember it from the early 70s, you'll think it's just another typical high-schooler gone superhero story.
• Doki Doki School Hours got hit by this hard. The manga is one of the early examples of the "Wacky Homeroom"-format, up to and including a childish teacher, and likely formed the inspiration for other works like Azumanga Daioh and Lucky Star. Alas, the manga wasn't adapted into an anime until after Azumanga became a success, which made a lot of viewers cringe at the "tired and old" jokes.
• Dragon Ball for that matter. It seems horribly cliché now (even more so than Fist of the North Star, if only because it was copied more, or at least more directly, given that Dragon Ball paved the way for more mainstream Shonen tropes compared to Fist of the North Star inspiring older-demographic Seinen tropes) but it was refreshing at the time. One of the big ones is the Idiot Hero, which has been done to death in Shonen, but Goku was one of the first, though predated by the title character of Kinnikuman.^note And besides that, Goku is more naïve than stupid. That's The Theme Park Version for you - the real version will take forever to read. All said and done though, Dragon Ball gets the Grandfather Clause treatment much like Superman (who fans love to compare and match up against Goku due to their superpowered alien child background).
• El-Hazard: The Magnificent World: By now, there's such an (over) abundance of Isekai anime that you've probably seen it all at this point; a young male protagonist gets transported to another, magical medieval world that the protagonist has to adapt to with a harem of girls who develop feelings for him and get into all sorts of funny situations with him. Assuming you haven't watched El-Hazard first, then by the time you get to either the OVA or the anime TV show, the series will feel like it's not breaking any new ground or providing anything you haven't already seen dozens of times before. However, El-Hazard does hold the lofty position of being one of the very earliest Trapped in Another World anime during a time in the 90s when there weren't a whole lot of anime dedicated to this kind of genre. So in a way, El-Hazard can be seen as that first draft prototype which pioneered a lot of what you see nowadays in most Isekai anime.
• Excel♡Saga:
  • At the time of the anime's release, it was considered the height of crazy and insane, especially among anime fans outside of Japan who viewed it as the ultimate example of a Quirky Work. In the years since, with shows like Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt and Gintama pushing parody and line crossing humor even farther, Excel comes off as downright tame and subdued.
  • Episode 26. As the episode is all about pushing the envelope, it's naturally going to look quaint nowadays considering the territory that anime has gone into since then.
• Fist of the North Star seems like an incredibly cliché shonen (or seinen at times), but keep in mind it more or less helped create many of the shonen tropes that exist today and, despite playing straight many tropes that today are discredited, it plays them in such a way it manages to remain fresh and popular after 40 years. Along with Dragon Ball, many people cite it as a Gateway Series or an inspiration for other Shonen creations.
• The 2003 anime adaptation of Fullmetal Alchemist was hugely popular when it first came out and it was a notable Gateway Series for North American anime fans, though even then there were some detractors who didn't like how much it deviated from the manga (particularly with its Darker and Edgier tone). When a more faithful adaptation of the manga aired in 2009, it soon became very popular in its own right, and eventually it completely supplanted the 2003 anime in the popular zeitgeist. Nowadays, with the 2009 anime being as well-loved as it is, it's difficult for many anime fans to see just how popular the 2003 anime was, especially due to its ending compared to the Brotherhood version that viewers felt was overall more faithful to the series.
• Love Hina was first published in 1998, with the anime adaptation first airing in 2000. While it shares a considerable number of clichés with modern Harem Genre works (like the tsundere lead girl and the Accidental Pervert guy), it still has some refreshing ideas. While most harems are set in a school environment with teenagers, Love Hina is set in a post-school setting from Keitaro's perspective, in an inn with young adults and teenagers. Also, Love Hina never was a fully-fledged harem series, considering Keitaro chose Narusegawa since the beginning and most of the girls are either rooting for them to become a couple or, at best, waiting for a chance if Keitaro changes his mind, while most harems after it have the main character unsure about which girl to choose. Unfortunately, the harem-related tropes the series introduced have been used by so many other manga and anime in the years since that most people would dismiss it as a typical harem comedy, and the liberal use of Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male in particular, while uncontroversial back then, would go on to get it it a lot of backlash once female-on-male abuse started being taken seriously.
• Thanks to airing on Toonami in the late 90's and early 2000's, Tenchi Muyo! was most western anime fans first introduction to not just harem anime, but to fanservice as a concept. For those who sought out the original Japanese version, its use of frontal nudity, including an instance on uncensored nipples, was considered shocking in the west. Nowadays, with anime like High School D×D not only being much more explicit with their fanservice, but making it the chief selling point, Tenchi's fanservice looks tame by comparison.
• Magical Girls. If you're not an old-school, die-hard fan, you'll probably think that everything in the genre is a ripoff of Sailor Moon.
  • Sailor Moon itself gets this as well, as it created a sub-genre, and in many countries also contributed to make Anime popular in the first place. When compared to some more modern shows, it can look overly cheesy, Filler-ridden, and low-budget.
  • Another magical girl series to suffer from this and which predates Sailor Moon is Majokko Meg-chan, from 1974. It introduced many now-common elements to the genre and was groundbreaking as far as the genre was concerned. Nowadays, since the tropes it introduced have been done repeatedly since, it isn't highly regarded.
  • Try any show from the Cute Witch or Magic Idol Singer era of early magical girls (something the above-mentioned Meg-chan belongs to). Some may look down on them for lacking the hard-knuckle action of the Magical Girl Warrior subgenre (sometimes even thinking they're watered down versions of the concept). Others may find them quaint in their own genre, with series like Cardcaptor Sakura, Little Witch Academia, or Tweeny Witches making them look "not witchy enough" and works like the Pretty Series and Aikatsu! making them look "too mundane" for magic idols.
  • Himitsu no Akko-chan, a manga commonly regarded as the first magical girl series, involved Atsuko solving problems by using her magic compact to disguise herself. Against the later Cutey Honey, who could do all that with her choker and kick massive amounts of butt while she does it? That looks downright cute.
  • Futari wa Pretty Cure experiences this compared to later installments in its franchise. Where once the series was considered bold for being an action-packed Magical Girl Warrior series for young girls, it's now considered tame considering the insane fights entries like Heartcatch, Go! Princess, and Hugtto would have. The outfits and trinkets are also considered tame, considering later entries could keep the premise and let the characters be as girly as they wanted.
  • Wedding Peach: Other than the usual "Sailor Moon ripoff" argument, the series is often said to be a fairly cookie-cutter Follow the Leader magical girl show. While it wasn't the first to use most of the tropes in it, it was in fact the Trope Codifier for certain elements of the genre, such as the Pink Heroine being the lead magical girl.
• Mazinger Z, the Trope Codifier for Super Robot shows, never got that much love in the States, due to the fact that it was usually picked up sometime after successive shows, such as Voltron and even Grendizer got popular, leading to Mazinger often being called a ripoff of its own derivatives.
  • Similarly, while Mazinger Z and Getter Robo were hugely influential and are often seen as the grandfathers of the Super Robot genre, the shows themselves often get criticized by modern fans for being really repetitive and boring by modern standards. The treatment of women, while par for the course in the 70's, also comes under fire from many modern anime fans.
• Likewise, Mobile Suit Gundam, the Trope Maker for Real Robot shows, never quite caught on in the States, airing after the explosively popular Mobile Suit Gundam Wing on top of being more than two decades old by the time it aired there. Even many fans of Universal Century timeline, the continuity of Mobile Suit Gundam, prefer the sequel series Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam or the more modern OVA series.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion has single-handedly popularized the concept of Deconstruction for formulaic, beaten genres, as well as demonstrating just what circumstances would realistically result in a token teenage action protagonists having to save the world, and how much pain, isolation and psychological pressure they would have to endure in the process.
  • As explained on Older Than They Think, some of those criticisms the show makes are even rooted in the themes of those "tired old shows": look at something like Zambot 3 and its treatment of kid heroes now, or even Mazinger Z and its treatment of the mechs and their pilots, and you'll have people clamoring "Pfft, Eva did it better."
  • This of course prompted imitators who went full steam ahead with Darker and Edgier deconstructions that applied Cerebus Syndrome to anything from Mons (like Shadow Star and Digimon Tamers) to Magical Girl series (including hits such as Revolutionary Girl Utena and Puella Magi Madoka Magica) to shonen action series (such as Attack on Titan and Hunter × Hunter). Likewise, Reconstruction series also emerged that attempted to justify the casual, hot-blooded nature of a Super Robot show (such as GaoGaiGar, RahXephon, and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann).^note The same thing happened on the shonen action side in the second half of The New '10s, bringing series such as Black Clover and My Hero Academia. As as result, the modern viewer is likely to be familiar with some themes and aesthetics started by Evangelion but would probably not consider its approach and message as innovative.
  • The series has also become so ingrained in Japanese pop culture that the sequel/remake series doesn't even try to retain some of the elements that were treated as Ass Pulls or Driving Questions in the original show. There's just an assumption that thanks to Pop-Cultural Osmosis, the audience already knows stuff like Kaworu being an angel or Lilith being locked up underneath the NERV base, and the producers instead preferred to concentrate on the original's other strong side: unique designs of the Evangelions, Angels and locations, as well as Visual Effects of Awesome. The public was impressed, but those who debated the original were quite uncertain as to what message do the new movies try to convey, or whether there even is one.
  • Partially due to the above reasons, the third film in the Rebuild saga was rewritten from the ground up to outdo the original series in the Shoot the Shaggy Dog department. The end result wasn't as well received as the previous two. New viewers were dismayed by the blatancy and shoehorning of drama, while the hardcore fanbase had an outcry over the misaimed shock value. Like the sequels to The Matrix, 3.33 played up the aspects that were supposed to surprise and shock the viewer as if they were just as groundbreaking as when the original was released in 1995. However, due to various anime series that responded to everything that the original Evangelion stated, or that refuted the original show's cynicism, the third film didn't have the expected emotional impact, and when analyzed, turned out not to actually be all that thoughtful due to the rushed plot and so many The End of the World as We Know It situations the viewers won't be surprised by anymore.
• Osamu Tezuka falls victim to this in the American market. His characters look much closer to Disney, Warner Bros., and Fleischer cartoons than modern anime and manga, making his art look quaint to modern manga readers. Additionally, it's hard to spot the sheer innovation in his page layouts and stylized pacing when they've more or less become the norm after around fifty years.
  • Astro Boy is THE Anime and Manga. It was the first truly popular piece in not only Japan, but also in the States, where it was one of the first anime it and other foreign audiences had ever received. It's hard to articulate how much Astro Boy means to the medium; it's on par with Mickey Mouse in how important of an animated work it is.
  • New Treasure Island, Tezuka's breakout work and often incorrectly referred to as his debut^note He had been drawing for a few years already; this was simply his first long-form adventure work, as opposed to the simple gag comics he'd been doing previously, has been most widely cited for its first two pages, depicting its lead character driving a car. Manga creators such as Fujiko Fujio have praised these pages' cinematic qualities and then-unparalleled sense of excitement, and they were highly influential to a generation of authors, but after 70 years of ever more dynamic manga art, the pages seem rather flat and slow.
  • To the modern-day reader, The Mysterious Underground Men is just another relatively obscure Osamu Tezuka manga from his early days. No masterpiece, but still a fun book to spend half an hour or so reading. But to the people that read it when it first came out in 1948, it was shocking to see a manga with some genuinely tragic moments. Not only was Tezuka bringing tragedy to manga, he was doing it by using plots where main characters died in a medium where this was unheard of until now.
  • Naoki Urasawa's Pluto, an Ultimate Universe of an Astro Boy story arc from the '70s, is a lot closer to the original story than some people may realize. The primary change is simply a Perspective Flip.
• Robotech. With its dramatic tone and unvarnished depictions of the death and destruction caused by war, it was the first localized anime to really display Japanese animation's capacity for weighty, dramatic stories to a western audience. With uncut translations of space opera now a dime a dozen, and with the series' multiple flaws now harder to forgive, many now ignore the series' achievements and instead focus on the compromises made in the franchise's creation—namely, the stitching together of three distinct and unrelated anime series into one narrative, necessary for the series to get a syndication deal. The Macekre page goes into greater detail about the significance of Robotech, despite the title being a Take That! to Carl Macek for said compromises.
  • The Expanded Robotech Universe, particularly Sentinels, blew the marriage of Rick and Lisa out of proportion by modern standards. The wedding took two comic book issues to tell and that was after about ten issues of "anticipation" leading up to the big day. Sentimental fans might be to blame. New fans were wondering when they were going to just launch the mission.
• Saint Seiya suffers from this quite badly if one were to watch if after seeing more recent Shōnen series, especially during the Gold Saint arc. It pretty much created the Rescue Arc, and if not, it certainly was what popularized it. This trope is the main reason this show never caught on in the USA like it did almost everywhere else, as it had the misfortune of not getting dubbed until after series that were already directly inspired by it such as Ronin Warriors had already aired years earlier to high ratings, resulting in this show being branded as a rip-off(though Cartoon Network's poor treatment of the English dub-Knights of the Zodiac certainly didn't do it any favors).
• Katte Ni Kaizo, a comic about a boy who believes his world to be a Fantasy Kitchen Sink and forms a club based around it, and in the end it all turns out to have been a Cuckoo Nest. That description makes it sound like a parody or a Deconstruction of Haruhi Suzumiya; thing is, Kaizo predates Haruhi by a couple of years.
• When Azumanga Daioh (which is frequently and fittingly compared to Seinfeld itself) debuted in 1999, the idea of a manga that focused solely on the ennui of daily high school life was a radical concept, especially for a series with a predominantly female cast, and with more focus on the girls' quirky personalities than on fanservice. The manga and its anime adaptation achieved widespread international popularity and became the Trope Codifier for the Schoolgirl Series as the 2000's continued. Nowadays, while the series is still well-remembered and maintains a cult following online, the revolutionary nature of its concept is lost on an audience used to the ubiquity of schoolgirl sitcoms in anime.
• When Three Leaves, Three Colors received an anime adaptation in 2016, it was generally bashed for being a cliché series that heavily copied the biggest Schoolgirl Series shows, as well as being aimless with no overarching plot to speak of. The manga actually first started publishing in 2003, a good half-decade before K-On! and its ilk. In fact, it's likely that many other manga, including the former, take inspiration from it (whether intentionally or not).
• Science Ninja Team Gatchaman is the Trope Codifier for nearly all giant robot AND Five-Man Band tropes. It started the entire Sentai genre. Today, it's just seen as another combinable mecha show.
  • Furthermore, while the Action Girl is common in both eastern and western works today, both Jun the Swan and Sayaka Yumi (Mazinger Z) are contenders for the first action girl in anime.
• To one who grew up in the 2000s and the new tens, The Vision of Escaflowne may come of as one big Cliché Storm - especially since a lot of people (despite its initial run in Japan not faring so well) have actually used it as an influence.
• In Pokémon: The Series, Ash losing the Indigo league championship was actually a rather shocking outcome that threw viewers for a loop.... That is, the first time it happened. In almost every series since he lost every single Pokemon league, and it became so predictable (and increasingly frustrating since he typically lost because of something beyond his control, including, most egregiously, a trainer who used nothing but Mythical Pokémon) that Ash finally winning the Alola League in Sun and Moon was more surprising to viewers. Even children in the Fleeting Demographic who hadn't seen the previous seasons were often aware that Ash is supposed to lose via Pop Culture Osmosis.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • The series has been homaged, parodied, referenced, and exposed to so much Memetic Mutation from various other anime and video games that it can sometimes come off as a bit predictable, and some of the most infamous moments have become less shocking (especially when you Watch It for the Meme). It's important to remember the manga started in 1987, and a lot of the Shonen Jump series that share elements with it, such as Yu-Gi-Oh! and YuYu Hakusho were inspired by it, not the other way around. It's also ironic to note that due to Older Than They Think, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure gets accused of starting all the cliché tropes that it actually took from Fist of the North Star.
  • Ironically, the 2012 anime adaptation helped revitalize attention to it. With modern production values, a lack of filler (due to it starting decades into the manga's run), a good soundtrack, and good voice direction, JoJo seems fresher now than a lot of more recent anime and manga that it likely inspired in the first place.
  • Stardust Crusaders was originally seen as an exciting and refreshing take on the manga's formula that led to a massive growth of interest after the initially tepid response to Battle Tendency. The focus on Stands and consequent shift to Puzzle Boss-based fights was a huge departure from the standard Fighting Series layout, with Stardust Crusaders becoming the Franchise Codifier for JoJo as a result. Nowadays it's seen as by-the-book in the face of later parts' focus on increasingly complex storylines, fights, and especially Stands, whose powers went from stock abilities like Super-Strength and Playing with Fire to the memetically-hard-to-explain "erasing time" within just two parts.
• The cover of the manga anthology book Four Shôjo Stories boasts that it contains "Japanese comics from a uniquely female perspective." In other words, the manga in it is shôjo made by women. When it was first published, this was pretty much unique for a manga published in the USA. Nowadays, the American manga market is brimming over with shôjo manga that women made, and it's hard to understand just how unique this book was when it was first released.
• Little Sister Heroine and Brother–Sister Incest in general have also been subjected to this recently. Originally, visual novels like Yosuga no Sora and Kana: Little Sister that are dedicated to this were considered to be something exceptional and unusual, and the "little sisters" were considered to be very cute and likable heroines that receive loads of focus and development. By now, however, there have been so many manga and light novels in this genre published that imouto-titles are, at best, considered extremely cliche because of endless copying of the same plot elements, and at worst, disgusting pervert fantasies on par with lolicon and the like. It's even harder to find fans of this kind of series outside of Japan due to Values Dissonance and it doesn't help that many such heroines are often Tsunderes (Oreimo is to blame for this), which itself, as seen above, is yet another reason why these series aren't as fondly looked at today as when they debuted.
• Devilman. While its cheesiness and repetitive plot structure were quite standard for children's anime of the time, these same elements make it quite dated to a modern audience. This is especially noticeable when you compare it to the manga, which is dated in its own ways (like Nagai's crude art), but which has overall stood the test of time far better thanks to its more ambitious story.
• Lucky Star tends to suffer from this, especially the anime:
  • It was among the earliest manga and anime to deliberately make its characters and plot about anime Otaku who would actually discuss anime and its fandom, and the anime in particular includes a lot of Shout Outs to other anime, manga and video games. This made the anime quite popular, since it was both relatable Slice of Life and it had its finger on the pulse of the then-current anime otaku's interests. However, as the years went by, the anime's numerous references became increasingly dated (there are a lot of references to Haruhi Suzumiya, which was at the height of its popularity at the time) and the premise of "otaku characters talk about anime and fandom tropes" has become much more common since the anime first aired, which doesn't make the series stand out as much as it once did.
  • While it was one of the earliest and most successful Schoolgirl Series, most of its Slice of Life elements don't hold up as well compared to other schoolgirl series that followed; the series is very dialogue-driven, and about 80% of its scenes consist of the characters just sitting or standing around and having rambling conversations about mundane things. Compared to later schoolgirl series, which tend to incorporate more visual gags and situational humor, this can make Lucky Star seem rather dull to modern viewers.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh!, Yugi using Exodia to win an otherwise unwinnable duel against Kaiba was suspenseful at the time the relevant chapters/episodes were released. Since it became a Signature Scene of the franchise, and Exodia became one of the most popular, recognizable monsters, most of the tension is lost as a result.
  • It also helped that in the manga and Toei anime, it was the climax to the longest and most dire arc in the story thus far, with Yugi thinking one of his friends was dead and the others held hostage. In the second anime, it was the very first episode and didn't have all of the arc leading up to it, leaving out the laser tag game with real lasers, the fight to the death with a serial killer, and more.
• Tomorrow's Joe's protagonist uses "ore" as his personal pronoun. Back in the 1960s, a shonen hero that the reader/viewer was asked to identify with and relate to using an assertive "macho" pronoun then associated with hoodlums, ruffians, and villains of all stripes was an unprecedented decision, and sparked a great deal of controversy. As early as a decade later, however, "ore" had become the default pronoun for just about every male character in Japanese media who wasn't a very young boy or Shrinking Violet, to such an extent that it's downright impossible to see what made Joe so groundbreaking in that department.
• No Game No Life became highly popular because a Trapped in Another World fantasy revolving around a Godlike Gamer was genuinely novel for the early 2010s, and Madhouse's stellar animation made the anime adaptation a smash hit. However, due to the sheer amount of isekai light novels that revolve around games and gamers releasing in the latter half of the decade, the series quickly became lumped together with them, not helped by the studio's memetic lack of interest in making a second season of the anime. The general consensus among anime fans is that while the animation has held up, the story and characters haven't.
• Destiny of the Shrine Maiden is seen as a big landmark within the Yuri Genre. Prior to that point, most works somewhere in or adjacent to the genre made heavy use of Bait-and-Switch Lesbians, But Not Too Gay, or simply featured it for quick scenes of titillation rather than any kind of character-building—the ones that didn't tended to be niche mangas a step above doujins. An anime series that was explicitly and centrally about the romantic relationship between two girls, with an actual big-budget plot to go with it, was revolutionary. But nowadays, at least one show with a focus on sapphic romance tends to come out every anime season, and plenty of other shows will feature or imply it at some point. Consequently, a fan of the genre watching Miko today would probably just be put off by the many elements within it—the Hide Your Lesbians, the absolute heaps of melodrama, the massively toxic overtones in the main relationship, the Romantic Runner-Up who just makes the main relationship look even worse, and the relationship's use of sexual assault that is promptly forgiven by the end—that writers of later works such as Bloom Into You or YuruYuri staunchly avoided.
• Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai has suffered from this just as much as its parent series. It was huge when it was first published, being a manga about an incredibly popular video game running in an incredibly popular magazine and it helped codify the RPG Mechanics 'Verse. However, by 2020, when the series was rebooted as an anime, its Cliché Storm and Black-and-White Morality hadn't aged well, considering viewers had come to expect plots and characters with at least some moral complexity, and the concept of an anime based on a video game was hardly a new idea, with hundreds of series being set in RPG Mechanics Verses between the time that the manga first started and its reboot aired. Not helping matters is the fact that Magical Circle Guru-Guru, a parody of Adventure from that same decade, was also rebooted as an anime a few years prior, meaning that fans who might otherwise be interested in Adventure were less receptive to it because they'd watched it get poked fun at before they actually watched the series itself.
• Studio DEEN's anime adaptation of Fate/stay night was very well-received back when it was released in 2006, having fluid animation for the time. Since then however, every Fate Series animated work (especially ufotable's) has pushed the standard much higher to the point where big-budget fluid animation is simply the norm for the franchise, and said norm is of a higher quality than the 2006 anime. As such, someone who watches the 2006 anime after seeing later Fate works might be unimpressed by the animation in comparison, so much so that a common recommended viewing is instead to start with Fate Zero and then move to Unlimited Blade Works which tells a different route of Stay Night, especially given how linked the two anime adaptations are.
• Tekkaman Blade's D-Boy often gets flak today for being a Wangsty, brooding, lone-wolf hero. The thing is, when the anime first aired characters like Cloud Strife and Sasuke Uchiha hadn't yet made the trope into a standard yet. At the time, D-Boy was seen as fitting in perfectly with the dark tone of the anime.
• When Rurouni Kenshin first released in 1993, the Jidaigeki genre was still dominated by formulaic, idealistic TV series that portrayed the Sengoku and Edo periods as Ye Goode Olde Days; while gory, brutal historical fiction did exist before in Japan (i.e. Lone Wolf and Cub), it was constrained to niche mediums. Kenshin, on the other hand, ran front-and-center in Japan's most popular manga magazine while deconstructing the genre, making the point that there's a very good reason why sword-fighting samurai aren't around any longer. However, in the three decades that followed, dark, subversive historical fiction became the standard for Japan, most of which went much farther than Kenshin ever did in their examination of the past, while the traditional jidaigeki all but disappeared. As a result, the series ends up looking a lot more like the jidaigeki it was originally intended to deconstruct to modern readers and viewers, especially since it runs on nineties shonen tropes that are hardly used seriously today. This is one of the main reasons for the lukewarm reception to the 2023 reboot anime^note the other being the author's offscreen crimes—young adults of The New '20s, raised on years of deconstructive historical fiction, didn't see the series' approach as particularly innovative, and considered it to be just as theatrical and Anvilicious as any straight example of the jidaigeki genre from the seventies or eighties.
• It is not uncommon for Puella Magi Madoka Magica to seem tame compared to later Magical Girl Genre Deconstruction stories, as the deaths are few and bloodless while the story maintains an optimistic tone by the end despite the horrible things that the girls go through. But at the time when it first came out, the idea of a magical girl show that put on a front of cuteness only to take on dark topics and examine the grim implications of the genre was nearly unheard of; main heroines actually dying and/or going insane, villains of the week being actually scary and legitimate threats, and grayer, more complex morality were all genuinely surprising to see in a magical girl show to audiences used to the first Sailor Moon anime, Cardcaptor Sakura, the Pretty Cure series, and similar fare. But ever since then, stories like Magical Girl Site have pushed the bar so much and featured such dark and cynical storylines full of gore and dark topics that Madoka has somewhat lost its original punch, not helped by everyone going into the series fully expecting it to get dark (which was something the original marketing did its best to hide).

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